‘Blow Away’: the poignant song Kate Bush wrote about the tragic start of her short touring career
As a child, Kate Bush was inspired by her family’s musical leanings to write songs. After teaching herself to play the piano, she began writing, eventually producing a 50-track demo tape with the help of her parents. No record labels were interested until Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, who shared mutual friends with Bush’s family, got hold of the tape. He agreed to help a teenage Bush record a better demo, and soon enough, she was signed to EMI.
By 19, Bush had released her debut album, The Kick Inside, led by the single ‘Wuthering Heights’, inspired by the Emily Brontë novel. The track peaked at number one on the UK Singles Chart, remaining there for four weeks. With vocals recorded in just one take, Bush’s song is still one of her most popular tracks, aided by its iconic music video, which featured her performing a dramatic interpretive dance in a red dress.
Bush released her second album, Lionheart, in 1978. However, she has since expressed dissatisfaction with it, believing that EMI’s desire to capitalise on the success of her debut led her to rush the creation of her second record. Moreover, EMI demanded that she tour the two albums, resulting in ‘The Tour of Life’ – the first and only concert tour the singer has ever done.
The shows were designed to be more than just musical performances. They contained a heavy theatrical element, strong visuals and a narrative storyline. Each show was divided into sections and included backing dancers, intricate set designs, and props that Bush would often sing inside of, such as a giant egg. ‘The Tour of Life’ was a huge success, praised for blending musical performance with dance, mime, magic, theatre and poetry.
However, at the beginning of the tour, tragedy struck. A lighting engineer, Bill Duffield, died after falling nearly 20 feet from a panel on the stage onto concrete at Poole Art’s Centre in Dorset. Bush penned the gentle ballad ‘Blow Away’ to pay tribute to Duffield, which appeared on her following album, Never for Ever. The song directly references the incident, with Bush singing, “Our engineer had a different idea/ From people who nearly died but survived/ Feeling no fear of leaving their bodies here/ And went to a room that was soon full of visitors.”
She references a plethora of musicians that she hopes Duffield will meet in the afterlife, including Marc Bolan, Keith Moon, Minnie Ripperton, Sid Vicious and Buddy Holly. In a fan newsletter, Bush explained, “‘Blow Away’ is a comfort for the fear of dying. And for those of us who believe that music is perhaps an exception to the Never for Ever rule.”
Speaking to Zigzag magazine in 1980 (via Gaffa), Bush elucidated the process of writing ‘Blow Away’. “Although the song had been formulating before and had to be written as a comfort to those people who are afraid of dying, there was also this idea of the music, energies in us that aren’t physical: art, the love in people. It can’t die, because where does it go?”
She continued: “It seems really that music could carry on in radio form, radio waves… There are people who swear they can pick up symphonies from Chopin, Schubert. We’re really transient, everything to do with us is transient, except for these non-physical things that we don’t even control.”
In 2016, the musician explained why, apart from a 2014 residency at London’s Hammersmith Apollo, she hasn’t toured since 1979. She told The Independent, “It wasn’t designed that way because I really enjoyed the first set of shows we did. The plan at the time was that I was going to do another two albums’ worth of fresh material and then do another show.”
Bush added: “But of course, by the time I got to the end of what was The Dreaming album, it had gone off on a slight tilt because I’d become so much more involved in the recording process. And also, every time I finish an album, I go into visual projects, and even if they’re quite short pieces, they’re still a huge amount of work to put together. So I started to veer away from the thing of being a live performing artist to one of being a recording artist with attached visuals.”
Listen to the track below.
